Having an online presence is crucial to your small business’s success, and yet 46% of small business owners don’t have a website. Why is that?
The unfortunate reality is that a website is a lot of work. Creating a website may be as easy as clicking “Start” in a builder like WordPress, but a website’s mere existence is only marginally better than not having one at all – your website should showcase your value as a brand while also maintaining a helpful and user-friendly experience.
Let’s go through some of the most important things your website needs in order to be effective and engaging to potential customers.
Start with “Less is More”
We get it, the internet is endless. This means you can fill hundreds of website pages with information about all the unique aspects of your business, your products or services, your history, and your business’s mission. However, just because your website pages can be as long as you want doesn’t mean you should make visitors scroll for longer than the beginning credits of Star Wars.
Your potential customers decide in about .05 seconds whether they want to continue browsing your site. So what does that mean for your website design?
It means huge copy blocks and long, run-on sentences won’t work. Instead of writing a paragraph on your home page and landing pages, consider instead that a customer walked into a physical store and asked you to describe your whole business in a sentence or two. What are the key takeaways you want that customer to know? Those phrases should be displayed in large font on a non-cluttered page. Having dozens of photos is often overwhelming to a new visitor, so a clean, easy-to-read webpage can instill trust and excitement in your brand in less than one second.
Include Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
Clear and concise wording can go a long way in helping you make a sale on your website. Make sure your calls to action are just that – action phrases that tell potential customers what you want them to do. It can be something as short as “Book Now” or “Order Today,” or you can include a bit more context to help engage the customer: “Reserve YOUR luxury cabin today!” or “Shop our sustainable sock collection.”
These CTAs can be a showcase for your brand’s voice as well. You can tailor them to be professional, exciting, friendly – anything that captures the ideas and feelings you want your brand to create.
Use Those ‘You’s
Your website is for showcasing your business, but everything about it should be geared toward creating a connection with potential customers. You can do this In a variety of ways.
First, be very mindful of the power of “you.” There’s a reason most TV commercials have their actors look straight into the camera and talk directly to customers. And your website is just a big interactive commercial. Craft website content that caters to your customers, what your products and services can do for them, how your products solve a common problem your visitors may have.
This includes creating a customer-centric About Us page. This is your opportunity to give your visitors some insight into how and why your business came to be, and what it can do for customers. This page is becoming more and more important as younger generations trend away from shopping big business and continue looking for small businesses with heart, and purpose, to patronize instead.
Mobile-Friendly Is a Must
By 2021, mobile e-commerce sales are expected to account for 54% of e-commerce sales. And that is an even bigger reason to keep your website design and functionality uncluttered and intuitive.
Your web pages need to be scalable to a small screen, like a tablet or smartphone. The good news is that most website builders and web building software have mobile versions included in their templates.
SEO and Social Media
Once you’ve created and optimized your website, you need to create traffic. A perfect website is useless without visitors.
As you create your web pages, SEO (search engine optimization) should be the goal of every page. You want your website to rank high enough in search engines to get noticed by those potential customers who are already looking for products and services like yours. Keywords, title tags, meta tags – if you incorporate these small pieces enough on every page, you stand a good chance of increasing your site’s visibility.
Once you have all this optimized content and engaging design, it’s important to let your audience know where you are in the social media world. Adding links and previews to your social media pages means your website visitors can include your business messages in their own news feeds, profiles, and threads.
Step Up Your Website Game
It’s this easy to create a website – but if everyone’s doing it, you have to do it better.
SharedTEAMS offers the website design services you need, when you need it. As a member, you will have access to our team of professionals who will work with you to create your perfect online offerings with directory listings, website production, website tracking, online reputation, website maintenance, web page design, and website optimization.
Interested? Here’s how it works.